


That Crystal Ball Don't Know Nothing 'bout Us

by action-cat (clytemnestras)



Category: Bandom, My Chemical Romance
Genre: Alternate Universe - Psychics/Psionics, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-15
Updated: 2015-03-15
Packaged: 2018-03-18 01:45:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,896
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3551462
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/clytemnestras/pseuds/action-cat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You would think being a beach-front psychic with actual psychic powers would make life easier for Gerard.</p><p>You would be wrong.</p>
            </blockquote>





	That Crystal Ball Don't Know Nothing 'bout Us

**Author's Note:**

> this story is so incredibly silly i really have nothing to tell you other than I'm sorry

Gerard hates nights like this. It’s spring, still light out but too cold for anyone to be out on the beachfront this late. But his manager’s been giving him shit for closing up early so he’s stuck glaring out at the waves and freezing his ass off. The windchimes jangle like they’re mocking him.

 

He’s halfway to flipping them off when he realises how ridiculous that is.

 

It’s the incense, probably - he’s delirious with it, and the smell’s stopped washing off in the shower. He’d give his right arm to wake up one day not smelling like an explosion at a new age spa retreat. The fake velvet curtains catch the breeze and whip around like being pulled by ghosts and for a second he worries about them finding the candles and setting the hut ablaze, but then he forgets why that would be a bad thing.

 

He drops his head onto the table and waits for the world to end.

 

Braying laughter filters in from the beach and Gerard bangs his head on the table a few times before it gets any louder. Drunks. Spec-fucking-tacular.

 

It’s around a minute and a half before they tumble into the booth, two girls and three guys, all hanging off of one another like their legs can’t hold them up alone.

 

“Yo, Robert Smith!” A very tiny girl with black hair grins at him. “Tell me what the spirits say.” She grins at him and sits down at the table, leaning forward to pluck the tarot card from where it’s stuck to his head.

 

The Lovers. Excellent.

 

Gerard sighs. “Give me your hands, palms up. You just want a general fortune, yeah? No cards and shit.” It’s too late, seriously. She nods and giggles, pressing her face into her shoulder and it’s going to be a long night, he can just feel it. He takes her hand in his and closes his eyes.

 

The words tumble out as the images come into his mind; the dog she finds in the middle of the road cleaned up and taken home, the gig where her femur snaps, the wedding, the baby, puppies-babies-puppies-music-dancing-joy-music-love- _car crash._

 

He lets go with a blink. The girl’s eyes are wide and sober when they blink back at him. One of the guys leans down to tap her shoulder.

 

“Hey, Jams, you okay?”

 

“Yeah, yeah.” She slides off the chair and the other girl (blonder, taller, drunker) takes her place; one by one each member on the group taking his hands and hearing their futures spilled out in a rush of words and incense smoke. They mostly laugh through it, even though the first girl sits tiny and sobered up on the velvet cushions at the side.

 

When the last guy slides in, though, there’s something off. All compact energy and dark hair gelled into spikes - not, well; Gerard's lived with this for so long he doesn’t notice people, except when he does, and he really notices this guy. His brown eyes have a kind of dull light to them, behind the alcoholic haze. It shouldn’t mean much, but it does.

 

“Hands?”

 

Brown Eyes folds inked hands onto the table and doesn’t talk, hasn’t said a word since he stumbled in. Gerard takes his hands and presses his eyes shut.

 

Everything is white.

 

Softness blooms in his mind, bright and gentle and calm.

 

A high sound, like feedback wheedles in his head and he floats on the whiteness, and the silence, soft and bright and - he tears his hands back.

 

“Holy fuck.”

 

Brown Eyes shakes his head. “What, is it that bad?” His voice is clipped, kind of awed.

 

“No, it’s...” He can hear the panic in his voice, the confusion. “There’s nothing. I can’t see anything.”

 

“Oh.”

 

“What the fuck man?” One of the guys he came in with claps his hand down on Gerard’s shoulder. “You couldn’t even make something up? What a fucking hack.” He drops two ten dollar bills and turned away, tugging the curtain open.

 

“Seriously.” The other girl, the blonde, tugs on Brown Eyes’ hand as they all file out, the tiny girl lingering in the doorway for a moment too long, and then they’re gone.

 

Gerard can’t quite move. There was just..nothing.

 

Since he was a kid, just brushing his hand against someone else’s would give him a flashflood of images, watching their life spin by. He watched six year olds get married, school teachers die, his parents divorce before he knew what it meant. It had him in therapy at ten, a drop out at sixteen and a psychic-for-hire for the last six years, and he’s never had a blank reading. Never touched someone and seen _nothing_.

 

It’s fucking throwing him.

 

He blinks and it’s dark out, time to close the shop up and go home. And he does, in a daze, blows out all the candles and changes back into his street clothes and stumbles back into his apartment with white behind his eyelids and static ringing in his ears.

 

**

 

When he gets to the shack in the morning, there’s a small person curled up in a black hoodie waiting for him.

 

“Hey dude, I kinda need to get in there, so, if you don’t mind…” _moving your ass so I can begin my day of misery, that’d be fucking great._

 

The person shifts and squints up at Gerard, the sun painting them ghost-white and blurry and it takes him a moment to click.

 

“You’re the guy -  last night, with the,” he waves his hand at the shack because it’s actually kind of hard to gesture _nothing._

 

“I’m Frank, hi”, the guy offers, reaching up - and oh, right, Gerard helps him up.

 

And still, nothing.

 

Frank’s eyes are bloodshot and his hands are cold. He must have been sitting there for a while, hungover and small. Something in Gerard’s chest shifts, just slightly, he almost doesn’t notice.

 

“Are you gonna open up? I kind of wanted to talk, in case me sitting here waiting for you wasn’t obvious.” Frank squeezes Gerard’s hand, which apparently he’s still holding. He lets go with a sharp tug.

 

“Right, yeah, yes.” He fishes the keys from his jeans pocket and unlocks the hutch, spreading the velvet curtains and ducking behind the desk. “You can sit down wherever, I just need to get my moronic costume on.” He glances back and Frank is skirting his fingers over the wind chimes, listening to them shift and jangle under his touch. His tattoos peek out under his sleeve, and - and Gerard needs to get a fucking grip. He pulls his t-shirt over his head and slides the purple robe onto his shoulders, tying it around his waist in a tight knot.

 

When he turns back, Frank is watching him.

 

“So, um, you wanted to talk to me?” He swallows and sits behind the tiny wooden desk, spreading out the tarot cards and shuffling through them, just to do something.

 

“Yeah, I - you do have a name, right?”

 

It’s a near thing, just slamming his head down on to the table and hoping he knocks himself out. Really, Gerard’s restraint is admirable.

 

“Gerard, I’m Gerard. Hi.” He waves.

 

Frank nods, somehow looking at him and looking at everything but him all at once. “Right, and I’m Frank, and I’d really like you to know that I’m not crazy.”

 

The curtain catches on a gust of wind and cracks like thunder.

 

“...okay.”

 

Frank twists his fingers together and places them on the desk. “And I think you might believe me, because I know that you’re a real psychic.”

 

Gerard’s breath gets stuck somewhere between his lungs and the top of his throat.

 

“I, um.”

 

Frank looks up at him, a slice of black hair sweeping over his eyes, which in daylight look less brown, other colours sweeping through, even half-lidded and bloodshot. “Just let me finish, please?”

 

Gerard swallows again. “Sure.”

 

“Okay, so I know you’re a psychic because I, oh fuck it, I’m a telepath, okay? I hear all the ridiculous shit that goes through people’s brains every time I touch them, even when I’m drunk off my ass, and yet I touch you and you know what I hear? Crickets chirping in the fucking distance.”

 

Gerard kind of wants to lie down. He settles on breathing very, very slow. “Wow. So that’s why I couldn’t see you?”

 

Frank looks kind of incredibly small. “I guess so? I’ve never actually met anyone who could do shit like me before. I’m kind of losing my mind over here.”

 

“Wow.”

 

Silence settles uncomfortably over the shack, but any words Gerard could say get kind of lost between his mouth and his brain. And Frank, Frank has his head pillowed on his arms, skin tinged whitish-gray. A strange something settles into Gerard’s bones. He almost wants to stroke through Frank’s hair and will his hangover away, which, what the fuck actually.

 

He stands up and starts lighting the candles around the shack, fluffing the cushions with more care than strictly needed when Frank tugs at the edge of his robe and pulls him back.

 

He lets out a breath, watches it skim over Frank’s hair where they’re close, almost touching. Frank’s hand is pressed in just above his hip and his eyes don’t flick up to meet his.

 

“Do you know what it’s like to hear every little thing someone is thinking when you touch?”

 

And well, no, he doesn't. But Gerard knows how they’ll die in graphic detail, which is arguably worse. Y’know, arguably.

 

“How loud it is when you lean forward and press into them?”

 

Gerard lets out a shaky breath, because logic left off about three stops ago and now he’s trembling in place looking down at a tiny telepath, fighting the internal pressure urging him forward.

 

“Do you know how long I’ve waited to have a silent kiss?” Frank breathes, finally looking up at Gerard before his eyes slam shut.

 

Frank’s lips press against his, soft, so soft, a tiny butterfly kiss, closed but tugging gently at his bottom lip and every breath rushes out of Gerard’s body in a rush of air.

 

Calm brightness spreads out over him and he floats away on the feeling, just peaceful calm and the brush of lips over his and nothing, nothing at all.

 

Frank leans back to draw in a breath and the world shudders back with the spicy undertone of incense smoke. “Wow.”

 

“I, yeah.” Nothing has ever felt like that before.

 

Frank laughs and presses his head into Gerard’s chest, hand flexing on his hip. “Fuck, I feel like we should talk about this because literally all I know about you is your name and your frankly hilarious choice of career but I really want to feel like that again.”

 

Gerard’s hands settle around Frank’s neck, tilting his jaw up so they’re eye-to-eye. “You know, talking is seriously overrated.” He smiles and it spills out all the way from his chest and filters through his body like warmth. “However, last time I tried to do that here I almost got fired and Gabe nearly got arrested for public indecency, so… Coffee for lunch?”

 

Frank grins up at him, white teeth and sleepy-eyed. “You, my good man, have yourself a date.”

 

And, well, call him crazy, but Gerard has a pretty good feeling about this.

 

 


End file.
